The Facts of Life and Death (33 page)

The crush was so great and the air so thick that every handshake was damp and every face red and shiny. Ruby was clammy and itchy, and, under the fried onions from the burger van, she could smell the bodies of the other people in the crowd.

They went along the row of little stalls selling all things for lepers. There were anti-leprosy crystals, leper begging bowls, and one-armed, one-eyed rag dolls. Mummy had given Ruby two pounds to spend and they stopped so she could buy fifty pence’ worth of pus fudge, which was green with red swirls.

The man with one leg from the King’s Arms swung past them on a rough wooden crutch, ringing a bell.

‘Unclean!’ he called every few strides. ‘Unclean!’

‘Look at his stump,’ whispered Ruby, wide-eyed.

‘Show-off,’ said Daddy.

The sun set, although nobody could tell – the clouds on the horizon were so thick and black.

IT WAS UNCOMMONLY
quiet for a Saturday at Bideford police station and the night-shift were playing canasta in the incident room.

Calvin wasn’t. He was just enjoying the peace and quiet. Not only was it quiet here, but when he got home it would be quiet there, too. Or as noisy as he wanted to make it. The choice was his – that was the point. If he wanted to, he could spend the whole night watching porn and listening to Motörhead and eating all the crisps in the flat, which – after yesterday’s demob-happy supermarket sweep – was a
lot
. He’d got to the checkout feeling as high as a kite, and watched in cocky rebellion as the checkout girl had put through the beer and the snacks and the frozen pizzas and the DVDs with guns on their covers. He’d thrown in a Fifa soccer game from the bargain bin and he didn’t even have a PlayStation! He’d get one though. And an Xbox too, if he wanted it. All around him, Calvin had felt the envious eyes of married men burning into him and he’d felt like beating his own chest at the dearth of vegetables in his trolley.

How had he let that wedding nonsense go on for so long? He could see everything so clearly now. He felt as though he’d escaped a cult.

‘You’re very happy,’ King had said suspiciously.

‘Yes,’ he’d told her. ‘I broke up with Shirley.’

‘Oh dear. Was it awful?’

‘Yeah. But I don’t think she was my type.’

‘What’s your type?’

‘I’m not sure I have one.’

King had laughed and said,
Very wise
, and that was all they’d said on the matter.

Calvin looked up. Tony Coral was at the door of the incident room. He’d never mastered the phone system, even though it was the most basic version money could lease. Instead he liked to put the caller on hold and then get out of his chair with a creak and a sigh and wander about the building looking for the caller’s target recipient.

Now he put one hand against the door-frame and tilted, standing on one leg with the other extended behind him, as if he were about to glide into the incident room on ice skates.

‘Got a bloke here with a missing person.’

Calvin was the youngest at the station and the card players all looked at him, so he went out to the desk, to save Tony Coral the trouble of cutting the caller off.

‘I want to report someone missing,’ said the man on the phone. ‘Right, sir. Can I take your name, please?’

‘Marshall. David Marshall.’

‘And what’s the name of the person you believe to be missing?’

‘Georgia Sharpe.’

‘Sharpe with an
e
?’

‘I think so. On the end.’

Calvin took all the details the form demanded. Georgia Sharpe was a teacher at Westmead Junior School. She was only twenty-something and he wondered out loud why her family weren’t reporting her missing.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Dave Marshall. ‘I think it’s just her and her father, and he lives miles off. Scotland or somewhere like that.’

‘Is she Scottish?’ said Calvin. An accent would be helpful on a missing-persons report.

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

‘Look,’ said Dave Marshall, ‘I hope I’m not wasting anyone’s time. I don’t know Georgia that well. She only started here in the summer. But she’s a nice person and very good at her job and I don’t think she’d miss work unless she was sick, and if she were sick then I think she’s the type who’d definitely call in, and she didn’t, and I couldn’t get an answer on her phone.’

‘OK, Mr Marshall,’ said Calvin. ‘We’ll send someone round to check whether she’s there and then if necessary we can take things further.’

Calvin would bet a pound to a pinch of dog shit that they’d find Georgia Sharpe in bed with flu or a boyfriend, but he liked saying
We’ll send someone round.
It was the kind of thing they said in American cop shows, even though he knew it would probably end up being just
him
going round and tapping on a window like an elf.

They’d give it twenty-four hours, of course. They always gave a missing person twenty-four hours to show up unless it was a child or someone had seen them bundled into a van.

Or they’d called their mother.

But that hadn’t happened in this case. This sounded far more straightforward.

Calvin was typing up the report to leave for whoever was on tomorrow night when Tony Coral came back again. He lowered his voice to a stage whisper.

‘Got a maid here with a box of pornographic videos.’

‘Good for her,’ said Calvin.

Coral jerked a thumb over his shoulder and back towards the front desk.

‘Name’s Sheila. She wants to talk to you.’

As the youngest, Calvin knew to be on his guard against pranks – especially on a Saturday night – so he followed Tony Coral with a frown of caution fixed firmly on his face.

But it wasn’t a prank.

It was
much
worse than that.

It was Shirley.

Shirley, with a cardboard box full of junk he’d left at her flat. Including three or four DVDs they’d watched together right at the start of their relationship, when they were still making an effort. It wasn’t hard-core porn – just Milfs and Big Boobs – but it still wasn’t the kind of thing Calvin wanted to assume ownership of across a police-station counter – especially from an ex-girlfriend who had obviously been drinking and crying in equal measure, from what he could see through the crack in the door.

He stopped dead and signalled Tony Coral back towards him.

‘That’s my girlfriend,’ he hissed.

‘Oh yes?’ said Tony Coral. He leaned again – backwards this time – to get a better view of Shirley. ‘Pretty maid,’ he said approvingly.

‘My ex-girlfriend,’ Calvin added.

‘Quite
sturdy
, in’t she?’

Calvin ignored that out of old loyalty. ‘We just broke up a week ago.’

‘Ah,’ said Coral, nodding as if he understood everything. Then he added, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t want to see her.’

‘Aah,’ nodded Coral. This time he obviously
did
understand.

‘Can you say I’m out on a job?’

‘I already said you were here.’

‘Can you say you were wrong?’

Tony Coral looked offended. ‘That would be lying.’

Calvin sighed. He knew Coral wasn’t joking; he really was a stickler for the truth, however inconvenient.

‘Then I’ll go out,’ he said. ‘Right now. Give me five minutes and then tell her I’m on a job and by then it’ll be the truth.’

‘Righto,’ said Coral. ‘What job?’

Calvin thought for a second. ‘That missing person that just came in. I’ll go out to Fairy Cross and knock on a few doors, OK?’

‘No problem,’ said Coral. ‘Shall I tell Sheila to come back another time?’

‘No! Jesus!’ Calvin hated this. The one true path was the one of least resistance and he desperately wanted never to have to see or speak to Shirley again. He realized that that was unrealistic, both living in the same smallish area of North Devon as they did, but the
last
thing he wanted was for Shirley to keep bringing his box of porn to him at work. Which he had no doubt she would do – otherwise she would have just dropped it off at his flat, or thrown it in the bin in the first place.

She wanted to embarrass him.

Calvin sighed.

He owed her that, really. He’d hurt Shirley; he’d broken her heart and ruined her wedding with the hand-torn invitations and the fucking owl. The
least
he could do was to go out there and let her embarrass the socks off him with a box of Milfs and an engagement ring in the face.

Then he had a better idea.

‘Can’t you confiscate it?’ he said. ‘It is porn, after all.’

Five minutes later, Shirley was walking home without the pornography, and Calvin Bridge was driving a pool car to Fairy Cross.

Dave Marshall hadn’t had a specific address, but Calvin thought that it wouldn’t take much knocking on doors to track down Georgia Sharpe’s home. Everyone knew everyone in little places like that, even if they were new. Sometimes
especially
if they were new.

He felt bad about Shirley, but really, she’d brought it on herself.

IT GOT DARK.

Ruby’s headache had gone, along with the warmth. A sharp breeze had picked up and she wished she were wearing a jumper over her potato sack.

There was much cheering as the torches were lit and the flags were brought out and the parade started, led by the town crier and two ragged lepers on towering stilts.

Ruby felt the thrill of being part of something that felt crazy and ancient, and squeezed Mummy’s hand in excitement.

They were part of a great river of people that wended its way down the hill to the old hospital. There were so few people left over to watch and clap the parade that they clapped and cheered themselves as they walked, and rang their leper bells.

As Ruby passed the grim, grey house that was once home to the lepers of the parish, thunder cracked so hard that they all jumped, and then embarrassed laughter rippled through the parade.

Ruby looked up.

There were no stars at all, and the last dim glow of daylight showed her that this morning’s flat white sky had now blossomed into dark-purple clouds.

‘It’s going to rain,’ she said.

‘What a surprise,’ said an old beggar lady beside her and then cackled and rang her bell in Ruby’s face.

The fields by the river were muddy, but nobody cared. They walked a path of churned mud to where a hog was being turned on a spit, and Superman and Captain Hook queued up among the lepers, all with their paper plates and bread rolls and apple sauce at the ready.

They met the Braunds in the queue. They had brought Maggie with them in her pink fairy costume with glittery wings and a wand that was tipped with a silvery five-pointed star. The perfect deputy’s badge, if Ruby had still wanted to be a deputy.

Which she didn’t.

Mr Braund was much taller than Daddy and he and his wife were both dressed in brown sacking, very like Ruby’s. Except Mr Braund was too big and well fed to be a convincing leper; with his thick black hair, he had more of the Fred Flintstone about him. Adam and Chris were in ragged old clothes and had proper scabs. Chris had a bell, which he kept ringing right next to Maggie’s ear. She kept saying, ‘Stop it, Chris,’ and rubbing her ear, and he kept doing it again.

The Braunds were full of jolly
hellos.
Mummy said hello to them but Daddy only grunted, and Ruby’s tummy tightened the way it did on a school day.

‘Hi,’ said Adam.

‘You look like a real leper,’ Ruby said.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘So do you.’

‘I don’t have scabs,’ said Ruby. ‘We only had Weetabix.’

‘Still,’ he said, ‘your ashes are good.’

‘There’s Nanna and Granpa!’ said Mummy.

Ruby giggled. Nanna wasn’t in a costume, but Granpa was dressed like a pirate
with
leprosy. He had a big ginger beard to match his hair, and a fake hand that came off when you shook it.

Everybody laughed.

Granpa offered his fake hand to Daddy, but Daddy didn’t shake it – just looked at him so hard that Granpa stopped laughing.

‘There were trout jumping in the river earlier,’ said Adam. ‘You want to go and look?’

‘OK,’ said Ruby.

‘No,’ said Daddy.

‘It’s only over there,’ said Mummy.

‘Not with him,’ said Daddy, nodding at Adam.

There was a surprised silence. Then Mr Braund said, ‘What do you mean, not with him?’

‘Just that,’ said Daddy. ‘Not with him. The leaf don’t fall far from the tree.’

Ruby looked at Adam, who looked confused.

‘John,’ said Mummy quickly, ‘don’t be silly.’

‘Who’s silly?’

‘No one,’ said Mummy. ‘We’re all having a nice time. That’s all.’

‘And I’m spoiling it? Is that what you’re saying? I’m spoiling your nice time?’

Ruby felt the other people in the queue getting quiet to listen to them.

‘Take it easy, John,’ said Mr Braund. ‘She—’

‘Fuck you,’ said Daddy.

Mummy touched Daddy’s arm. ‘John— ’

Daddy shoved his paper plate into Mummy’s face, making her head twist sharply to the side, and she took a couple of surprised steps backwards. When the plate dropped to the ground, the bread roll was stuck for a moment on her cheek with apple sauce. Then that fell to the ground as well.

‘Whore!’ spat Daddy. Then he turned and punched Granpa in the tummy. Just once, but so hard that his teeth fell out.

‘Stop!’ said Ruby. ‘Daddy, stop!’ Even though she knew there were some things you could never stop, and she was afraid this might be one of them.

But Mr Braund stepped swiftly between Mummy and Daddy, and Superman and the back end of the horse were suddenly right there too, and Daddy said
Fuck you all
and walked off into the night.

‘Come away, children,’ said Mrs Braund, and started to try to gather them up and usher them away, but none of them went.

People were helping Granpa, and Nanna was fussing around, brushing mud off his dentures.

Ruby was shaking. And when she took Mummy’s hand, Mummy was shaking too.

‘Are you all right, Alison?’ said Mrs Braund.

Mummy nodded and tried to smile, but it didn’t work. ‘I think we should go home, Ruby,’ she said in a wobbly voice. ‘I’m not hungry, are you?’